Motorcycles have spent the better part of 140 years becoming increasingly complicated. We now have 200-horsepower superbikes with wings, adventure bikes with radar, cruisers with enormous touchscreens, and electric motorcycles that can download software updates while sitting in your garage.
But rewind the clock all the way to 1885, and the ancestor of the modern gas motorcycle looks less like a technological revolution and more like something somebody built after finding some spare lumber behind the shed.
